Eleni Katifori Awarded an American Physical Society Early Career Award

Eleni Katifori, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy, has been awarded the 2021 American Physical Society (APS) Early Career Award for Soft Matter Research for “the seminal use of physical principles in understanding living transport networks.”

The Katifori group's research seeks to uncover the physical principles behind the function and development of complex biological flow systems. This includes the investigation of how the connectivity and hierarchical nature of the networks lead to new emergent properties that could not have been predicted by detailed knowledge of the performance and behavior of an individual link.

Katifori was previously an independent group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany, before returning to the U.S. to join the faculty at Penn. She is a past recipient of a Burroughs Wellcome Career Award at the Scientific Interface and a National Science Foundation Career Award, and is a Simons Investigator in the Mathematical Modeling of Living Systems.

APS is a nonprofit membership organization working to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics through its outstanding research journals, scientific meetings, and education, outreach, advocacy, and international activities. It represents over 55,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories, and industry in the U.S. and throughout the world.